I am a direct competitor of Yelp and I have to say that the 'reviews' theory just doesn't ring true with me.
Firstly at Yelp's size the chances of something like that leaking are high and the legal and reputational consequences would be catastrophic.
Secondly, there are far more effective and subtler ways of promoting the interests of their advertisers and Yelp are one amongst the less aggressive exponents of these in the industry.
Yes, all of the summaries will be hand-written. At first it will be me with my significant other as backup, however I would be trialling writers with the aim of outsourcing so long as the quality/reliability was there.
A couple of excellent points there! You're right, so much of the value is in the comments. I guess it comes down to scale. There is a minimum threshold required to justify producing the summaries. The more subs, the more features can be justified.
To your point on hoarding links, a comment came through from the form that they would like to see tagging functionality. I wonder if there's something there?
Hi Sam, Hacker Newsletter provides a list of the most popular links, whereas HN Digest summarises those posts. The idea being, you might want to get the gist of an article without reading the whole thing.
I'm pretty sure Hacker Newsletter has been around for quite a while, so it's interesting that they have been able to make the free model work.
Hi Alex, I think a free option would be a great idea for a summary service with a larger market, I just don't know if the HN audience could sustain it. If I get a ton of responses who are just curious but not many willing to pay I will come back to that as a concept.
On gauging the quality of the service, I've included a sample digest on the site which I hope helps. However I take your point. People may well want to see that the level of quality is sustained.
For Techzing (techzinglive.com) fans, this idea came out of Jason and Justin debating the merits of a 'TL;DR for Hacker News' service on a recent podcast. I figured it would be simple enough to test, hence, HN Digest.